I don’t know how this whole Ian Snell thing is going to play out, but I can tell you that it’s headed nowhere good. In today’s notebook, DK talks to Neal Huntington, who actually calls Snell’s extension a mistake and closes the piece out with this:

“Our focus now is to salvage something from this situation,” Huntington said, “whether that’s a trade, or Ian comes back — maybe that’s in the bullpen — we’ll see.”

Check the whole thing out; I can’t ever remember a GM being so completely negative about a player that’s still in his system and frankly, I’m kind of shocked by it, even with everything that Snell’s said and done in the past month.

I posted that first because I’m fairly sure that Huntington said that prior to Snell’s start today (I know I heard during the game that someone said he called the Snell contract a mistake). In the lead to that notebook, DK has some of Snell’s postgame comments posted, but the Indians’ play-by-play guy, Scott McCauley has a lot more posted on his own blog. Here’s a sampling:

The guys made me feel welcome here. It was just fun to see this relaxed and fun atmosphere. Nothing against the guys up there you know they work hard they do everything …

It’s just the fans are electric here. You can tell, even though they don’t say much or cheer much they pay attention to the game. It was just fun pitching in front of them again.”

I owe a lot of credit to (Catcher Erik) Kratz. He did a tremendous job of setting up you know he didn’t set up too early where they can see where I’m going. He mixed the pitches real well …

Again, check out McCauley’s whole post because there’s a lot in there about Snell that’s worth reading. In the three paragraphs I’ve posted there, Snell tosses his teammates in Pittsburgh under the bus, completely slays Pirate fans, and then pushes his catchers under the same bus he already threw them under once, gets in the proverbial bus, backs over them several times, parks the bus on top of them, douses it with gasoline, and lights it on fire. Oh, but nothing against the guys up there. Talk about passive aggressive.

I have been accused by some people (including, I’m pretty sure, Snell himself, albeit in an indirect manner) of being too hard on Snell and making too much of the comments, like the ones above, that Snell makes after his starts. The final line on it is this; either Snell went out and did exactly what he did in the majors and found success against a Triple-A team, or he went out and flashed stuff that was above and beyond what he’s shown with the Pirates this year to prove a point to the front office and coaching staff and team. Neither is a good thing.

About Pat Lackey

In 2005, I started a WHYGAVS instead of working on organic chemistry homework. Many years later, I've written about baseball and the Pirates for a number of sites all across the internet, but WHYGAVS is still my home. I still haven't finished that O-Chem homework, though.